The Ministry of Jal Shakti holds a review meeting of the National Hydrology Project
The National Hydrology Project was started in the year 2016 as a Central Sector Scheme with 100 per cent grant to implementing agencies with a budget outlay of Rs 3,680 crore to be spent over a period of eight years. The project aims at improving the extent, reliability and accessibility of information related to water resources and to strengthen the capacity of water resource management institutions in India. The efficient and reliable information paves the way for an effective water resource development and management.
The project, in its mid term, has made significant progress in the fields of water resource monitoring system, water resource information system (WRIS), water resource operation and planning systems, institutional capacity enhancement and trainings.
The Minister of State, Jal Shakti, Rattan Lal Kataria, informed that under the NHP, a nation wide repository of water resources data — NWIC has been established. Approximately 1,900 real time data acquisition stations (RTDAs) have been set up and contract for 6,500 RTDAs have already been awarded. He informed that near real time data acquisition systems (NRTDAs) as well as manual data acquisition stations are being set up. India WRIS, water information and management system WIMS have been revamped. The major success has been bringing all states on board for data sharing on water resources, a task hitherto left unaccomplished by previous governments.
Kataria also directed authorities to share the valuable research work carried out under NHP in public domain and encourage universities/research institutes globally to benefit as well as contribute towards it. He termed NHP as a project of national importance. He stated that collecting data from scattered agencies posed a major bottleneck in effective water resource management and also a stumbling block in important policy level decision making.
Acknowledging progress made in data collection, he informed that 12,273 surface water stations have been set up by 2020 as compared to mere 878 in the year 2016. Around 70,525 ground water stations have been set up in a span of four years.
Kataria stated that data is a valuable resource and lack of interest shown by previous governments has resulted into unavailability of reliable historic data. He emphasised that the NDA government, under the dynamic leadership of Narendra Modi, is trying to amend all historical wrongs committed by the previous governments and correct the myopic perspective with which water resource management was being handled. He also hailed the very first step in this direction of setting up of Ministry of Jal Shakti for adopting an integrated approach towards effective water management.
He further informed that through NHP, the management of water resources shall witness a sea change since it will adopt an integrated approach and make use of latest cutting edge technology. For example, opening of gates for dams has so far been a manual operation but through NHP, these operations shall be changed into automatic mode on pilot basis for a few dams.
He lauded the efforts of Haryana government in implementing NHP and informed that Haryana is among the top ten performing states in terms of percentage of funds utilised.